Griffiths, P.

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Paul J. Griffiths

Griffiths was born in London, England, on 12 November 1955. Griffiths has held appointments at the University of Notre Dame, University of Illinois at Chicago, and the University of Chicago. A scholar of Augustine of Hippo, Griffiths's main interests and pursuits are philosophical theology and the philosophy of religion – particularly Christianity and Buddhism. He received a doctorate in Buddhist studies in 1983 from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and his early works established him as one of the most incisive interpreters of Yogācāra Buddhist philosophy. His works on Buddhism include On Being Mindless (Lasalle, IL: Open Court, 1991) and On Being Buddha (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994). After converting from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism and accepting the Schmitt Chair of Catholic Studies at UIC, he has largely given up his work in Buddhist studies. His recent books include: Problems of Religious Diversity (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001); Philosophy of Religion: A Reader (co-edited with Charles Taliaferro) (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003); and Lying: An Augustinian Theology of Duplicity (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2004). His latest book deals with curiositas and the nature of intellectual appetite; its title is: Intellectual Appetite: A Theological Grammar. According to the faculty pages at Duke Divinity School, from which he resigned in 2017, Griffiths has published ten books as sole author and seven more as co-author or editor. (Source Accessed Jul 21, 2020)

Library Items

Book
Buddha Nature: A Festschrift in Honor of Minoru Kiyota
This book contains ten essays on the topic of buddha-nature by prominent Buddhist Studies scholars, written in honor of Professor Minoru Kiyota (1923–2013), who taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1962 to 2008.
Griffiths, Paul J., and John P. Keenan eds. Buddha Nature: A Festschrift in Honor of Minoru Kiyota. Tokyo: Buddhist Books International, 1990. https://archive.org/details/buddhanatureafestschriftinhonorofminorukiyota_542_W/mode/2up.
Book
On Being Buddha
What is it like to be a Buddha? Is there only one Buddha or are there many? What can Buddhas do and what do they know? Is there anything they cannot do and cannot know? These and associated questions were much discussed by Buddhist thinkers in India, and a complex and subtle set of doctrinal positions was developed to deal with them. This is the first book in a western language to treat these doctrines about Buddha from a philosophical and thoroughly critical viewpoint.

The book shows that Buddhist thinkers were driven, when theorizing about Buddha, by a basic intuition that Buddha must be maximally perfect, and that pursuing the implications of this intuition led them into some conceptual dilemmas that show considerable similarity to some of those treated by western theists. The Indian Buddhist tradition of thought about these matters is presented here as thoroughly systematic, analytical, and doctrinal.

The book's analysis is based almost entirely upon original sources in their original languages. All extracts discussed are translated into English and the book is accessible to nonspecialists, while still treating material that has not been much discussed by western scholars.

(Source: back cover)
Griffiths, Paul J. On Being Buddha: The Classical Doctrine of Buddhahood. SUNY Series, Toward a Comparative Philosophy of Religions. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994.
Article
Painting Space with Colors: Tathāgatagarbha in the Mahāyānasūtrâlaṅkāra-Corpus IX.22-37
The early history of Tathagatagarbha thought in India remains obscure. In attempting to elucidate it much depends upon how one chooses to categorize Tathagatagarbha as a system, upon the decisions one makes as to which terms, concepts, argument-patterns and so forth must be present in order for it to be proper to characterize some text or text-fragment as representing that system. These are large questions, much too large to enter upon in this paper; my purpose here is much more limited. I intend to offer a reasonably detailed exposition of a set of sixteen verses from the ninth chapter of the Mahāyānasūtrâlaṅkāra [MSA] (IX.22-37). These verses deal, or so the bhāṣya tells us, with the "profundity of the undefiled realm" (anāsravadhātugāmbhīrya), and they conclude (37) with the only use of the term tathāgatagarbha in the entire text There is little doubt that this is one of the few early occurrences of the term in Indian Buddhist texts surviving in Sanskrit; a relatively detailed study of these verses may perhaps shed some light upon the historical and doctrinal questions just mentioned.
          The systematic question underlying my comments upon these verses throughout will be: what is the relation between the ground of awakening, that which makes it possible, and the fact of awakening, its essential properties?
          In what follows I shall provide ftrst a brief introduction to the of the MSA-corpus; I shall then place MSA IX.22-37 in its context within the text as a whole, and shall translate the verses in full and offer expository comments on them, drawing in so doing upon the surviving Indic commentaries. (Griffiths, "Painting Space with Colors", 41–42)
Griffiths, Paul J. "Painting Space with Colors: Tathāgatagarbha in the Mahāyānasūtrâlaṅkāra-Corpus IX.22–37." In Buddha Nature: A Festschrift in Honor of Minoru Kiyota, edited by Paul J. Griffiths and John P. Keenan, 41–63. Tokyo: Buddhist Books International, 1990.
Review
The Buddha Within: Tathagatagarbha Doctrine according to the Shentong Interpretation of the Ratnagotravibhaga-Review by Griffiths
This book aims to expound, for both scholars and practitioners of Buddhism, the doctrine of the "emptiness-of-the-other" (shentong, to adopt the author's more-or-less phonetic method of rendering terms in Tibetan; a more formally accurate transcription would be gzhan-stong), a Buddhist tradition of metaphysical reasoning that has its roots in Indian tathāgatagarbha thought and is associated especially with the Kagyu and Nyingma lineages in Tibet. This tradition of reasoning, as the author claims, has been given little attention by Western scholars working on Indo-Tibetan Buddhism; they have focused on the Madhyamaka schools in India and on their Gelug and Sakya inheritors in Tibet, and to a somewhat lesser extent upon Indian Yogācāra. In so far as they have said anything about the Shentong tradition or its Indian precursors, they have tended to dismiss it as heretical or not really Buddhist-often following in this the rhetoric of Gelug polemics. Dr. Hookham's book is therefore a welcome corrective, being, as she claims, "the first book in a Western language to discuss at length the views of Tibetan Shentong writers on the basis of their own works" (p. 5). (Griffiths, Review of The Buddha Within, 317-18)

Read more here . . .
Griffiths, Paul J. Review of The Buddha Within: Tathagatagarbha Doctrine According to the Shentong Interpretation of the Ratnagotravibhaga, by S. K. Hookham. Journal of the American Oriental Society 113, no. 2 (1993): 317–19.
Book
The Realm of Awakening
This translation and study of Chapter Ten of Asanga's Mahayanasamgraha, one of the foundational documents of the Yogacara school of Mahayana Buddhism, presents the systematic thinking of one of the greatest early Buddhist theoreticians on the nature of the Buddha. Providing insight into Asanga's thought and influence in the development of Mahayana Buddhism in India, Tibet, China, and Japan, the book includes translations of early Indian commentaries on the text which have been preserved in earlier Chinese and Tibetan translations. (Source Accessed March 20, 2020)
Griffiths, Paul J., Noriaki Hakamaya, John P. Keenan, and Paul L. Swanson, trans. The Realm of Awakening: A Translation and Study of the Tenth Chapter of Asaṅga's Mahāyānasaṅgraha. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. http://promienie.net/images/dharma/books/asanga_mahayanasangraha.pdf.

Affiliations & relations

  • Warren Professor of Catholic Thought, Duke University · workplace affiliation
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